Worse Than Coleslaw

The job’s over and done with, and my time in Japan is running out.  A lot’s happened, and I have many interesting things to say but not so much opportunity to say them just now.  I’ve been “on the road” (in a purely metaphysical sense, since all of my traveling thus far has been done by train) for about a week and a half now.  Crashed for a few days in a fellow ALT’s new apartment amid the Yokohama Hills—which resemble the movie “City of God” but a lot more upscale—before making my way to Kyoto, and then Osaka.  I’ve visited a lot of cool places and done a lot of tourist-y stuff.  Pictures will be forthcoming, but I’d like to take a moment to write about one of the highlights of my trip, the Iwatayama Monkey Park in the southern part of Kyoto.

The Iwatayama Monkey Park is near the Hankyu Railway’s Arashiyama Station, which makes it sort of a pain in the ass to get to as the Hankyu line is privately run and doesn’t connect seamlessly with the Japan Rail lines that people use most often.  This can be seen as a benefit, though, since it means that the monkey park is not all that popular as a tourist destination despite the fact that there really are only so many shrines and temples—Kyoto’s main points of interest, in other words—one can honestly expect to visit in a condensed amount of time.  And even if you aren’t sick of looking at old religious buildings by the time you make it to Arashiyama, you have to pass through a small Shinto shrine to get to the monkey park anyway, which is an example of working smarter rather than harder.  Once past the aforementioned Shinto shrine, it’s up the side of a mountain along some zig-zagging dirt paths to a flat section near the top. Iwatayama Monkey Park is not a zoo, but a sort of nature reserve; apparently these macaque monkeys are actually native to the mountain and the surrounding areas, which I did not know.  Even along the paths you can see the monkeys frolicking freely with no barrier between them and the park’s visitors.  There are few guard rails on the narrow paths up the side of the mountain, which is pretty normal for Japan.  You can purchase peanuts or apple slices to feed the monkeys for a very reasonable 100 yen, and although the feeding has to be done through a fence from within the rest house near the top of the mountain, outside of that you are able to mingle freely with the nature.  A handout given at the gate to all visitors warns you to not make eye contact with the monkeys because they can be aggressive, and that’s pretty much the extent of the buffer between you and the beasts.

What was great about this small attraction, beyond the fact that it allows you to feed monkeys ohmygosh wow, is that it all just works.  Everyone is cool and hangs out watching the monkeys fool around.  No one screams “OOOH OOOH OOOH AHHH AHHH” noises at the monkeys the way people do at zoos in America.  There is no litter, either along the path or around the summit where the park is located, and none of the trees have asinine bullshit carved into them.  The signs say not to touch the monkeys, so no one touches the monkeys—or if they do, they have the sense not to get caught.  I was there for a little over an hour (I was waiting to meet some friends who got lost trying to find the place), and at no point did I witness anything that could be defined as a dick move.

I spent a few moments trying to imagine a similar set up working in America, and it just doesn’t seem feasible to me at all.  You just know that there would really be only two ways such a venture could end.  I’d give it a week, maybe two, before a monkey would choke on a discarded candy bar wrapper and the whole undertaking would have to be dismantled and the area declared off limits to preserve the animal population.  Either that or the park would get sued out of existence by some litigious parent whose hellspawn looked at an alpha male monkey cross-eyed and got his or her ass bit.  It’d be a race to see who could cry “foul” first.  And if you think I’m being needlessly misanthropic, just look at what happens at amusement parks when some kid undoes his or her safety harness and falls splat to the ground: the ride or even the whole park has to be closed down as an act of penance by its administrators despite the very obvious fact that their mechanical fun machines were not to blame for the accident.

I keep coming back to this point, but one thing that I definitely will miss about living in Japan is not having to devote nearly as much of my time and attention on dealing with other people’s ignorant bullshit.  I mean, where in America would I be able to do this?:

Video of the park and of monkeys doing adorable monkey stuff can be viewed here.

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